Found 647 article(s) in category 'Inequality'

People Over Pandas: Taiwan’s Engagement of International Human Rights Norms with Respect to Disability. William Alford, May 17, 2019, Book Chapter, “Taiwan’s early law (1980) regarding disability presumed a medical model—i.e., seeing disability as an individual problem rather than a societal responsibility. Facing considerable discrimination and inspired by the social model embodied elsewhere, including in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), citizen activists, including disabled persons organizations, have pressed for legislative reform. Following the earlier support of the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou for incorporation of the United Nations Human Rights Covenants into domestic law (owing to Taiwan’s being barred from formal accession), the Legislative Yuan in 2014 passed a bill designed to incorporate the CRPD into Republic of China (R.O.C) law. That measure not only retained all key provisions of the CRPD but also called on the Executive Yuan to conduct a comprehensive review of existing legal measures for compliance and pro-actively to engage persons with disabilities in implementing the new law, while also establishing innovative reporting and monitoring mechanisms intended to parallel the requirements of the CRPD. Much progress has been achieved but serious challenges remain regarding discrimination, especially with respect to employment and reasonable accommodations, while some scholars have questioned the suitability of a highly individual-focused rights-based model for Taiwanese society. Disabled persons organizations continue to play an active role both in policy and legal advocacy and in seeking to educate the public more broadly about disability.” Link

An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs. Dani Rodrik, May 8, 2019, “So-called productive dualism is driving many contemporary ills in developed and developing countries alike: rising inequality and exclusion, loss of trust in governing elites, and growing electoral support for authoritarian populists. But much of the policy discussion today focuses on solutions that miss the true source of the problem.” Link

Second Chance: Life without Student Debt. Marco Di Maggio, April 26, 2019, Paper, “Rising student debt is considered one of the creeping threats of our time. This paper examines the effect of student debt relief on individual credit and labor market outcomes. We exploit the plausibly-random debt discharge due to the inability of National Collegiate, the largest owner of private student loan debt, to prove chain of title for thousands of loans across the US. Using hand-collected lawsuits filings matched with individual credit bureau information, we find that borrowers experiencing the debt relief shock reduce their indebtedness by 26%, by both reducing their demand for credit and limiting the use of existing credit accounts, and are 12% less likely to default on other accounts. After the discharge, the borrowers’ geographical mobility increases, as well as, their probability to change jobs and ultimately their income increases by more than $4000 over a three year period, which is equivalent to about two months’ salary. These findings speak to the benefits of intervening in the student loan market to reduce the consequences of debt overhang problems by forgiving student debts.” Link

Equal Pay Day: closing the gender wage gap. Hannah Riley Bowles, April 1, 2019, Audio, “Today is Equal Pay Day so we’re going to spend the hour looking at the gender pay gap. Studies show that women working full-time make around 82 cents for every $1 that their male colleagues make. For women of color that divide is even larger. This hour, we’ll discuss why men continue to be paid more than women in the workplace, what role career choices and sex discrimination play in the disparity, and what can be done to shrink the gap. We’ll also talk about legislation that recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that would ensure equal wages for men and women. Our guests are JOCELYN FRYE, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and HANNAH RILEY BOWLES, senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School.” Link

Ricardo Hausmann on Venezuela, Inequality in Productivity, and Policy Lessons for International Development March 2019. GrowthPolicy’s Devjani Roy interviewed Ricardo Hausmann, Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard Kennedy School and Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University, on Venezuela, inequality in productivity, and policy lessons for international development. | […]

Why Does Hirschmanian Development Remain Mired on the Margins? Because Implementation (and Reform) Really is ‘a Long Voyage of Discovery’. Michael Woolcock, 2019, Paper, “A defining task of development is enhancing a state’s capability for policy implementation. In most low- income countries, alas, such capabilities seem to be stagnant or declining, in no small part because dominant reform strategies are ill-suited to addressing complex non-technical aspects. This has been recognized for at least six decades – indeed, it was a centerpiece of Albert Hirschman’s understanding of the development process – yet this critique, and the significance of its implications, remain on the margins of scholarship and policy. Why? I consider three options, concluding that, paradoxically, followers of Hirschman’s approach inadequately appreciated that gaining more operational traction for their approach was itself a type of problem requiring their ideas to embark on ‘a long voyage of discovery’, a task best accomplished, in this instance, by building – and tapping into the distinctive insights of – a diverse community of development practitioners.” Link

Humanitarian Markets. Ricardo Hausmann, March 25, 2019, Opinion, “The role of humanitarian assistance is like that of a car battery: it gets the cylinders moving until the sequence of internal explosions in the engine recharges the battery and makes the process self-sustaining. That task is made easier by using, rather than replacing, markets.” Link

Intergenerational Wealth Mobility and Racial Inequality. Alexandra Killewald, 2019, Paper, “The black-white gap in household wealth is large and well documented. Here, we visualize how this racial wealth gap persists across generations. Animating the flow of individuals between the relative wealth position of parents and their adult children, we show that the disadvantage of black families is a consequence both of wealth inequality in prior generations and race differences in the transmission of wealth positions across generations: Black children both have less wealthy parents on average and are far more likely to be downwardly mobile in household wealth. By displaying intergenerational movements between parental and offspring wealth quintiles, we underline how intergenerational fluctuation coexists with the maintenance of a severely racialized wealth structure.” Link

Renting Vs. Buying. How Important Is Owning A Home? Chris Herbert, March 18, 2019, Audio, “Is owning a home still the American Dream? A look at the pros and cons of renting versus buying in our special series, “Where We Call Home.”” Link

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